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There’s No Place For Joy in Today’s Moscow
Moscow is emptying out. Friends, old flames, are leaving. There’s a strange light in familiar windows. Even the city itself, as a space of the memory, belongs now to a past epoch, estranged from many...
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Svetlana Alexievich’s History of Human Feelings
In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Born to a Ukrainian mother and a...
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Svetlana Alexievich Grapples with Putin’s Russia
My father would say that he personally started believing in communism after Gagarin was sent into space. We’re the first! We can do anything! That’s how he and my mother raised us. I was a Little...
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How the Writer Listens: Svetlana Alexievich
For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a...
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From Mukasonga to Alexievich, We Need Writers Who Bear Witness
“I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer.” These are the words of author Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost 27 family members—including her mother and...
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5 Books Making News This Week: Mothers, Memoirs, and Military Women
This year’s fiction and nonfiction longlists for the Brooklyn Library Literary Prize honor “books which—by subverting literary forms, pushing against established ways of thinking, or otherwise...
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An Oral History as Beautiful as a Ruined Cathedral
“Alexievich’s introduction is worth the book’s cost alone. Anyone who has ever elicited important stories or traumatic remembrances ought to read it … Like all soldiers, they lost limbs; sanity fled...
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Svetlana Alexievich on Why She Does What She Does
For two years I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading. What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and...
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How Women Experience Beauty: A Reading List
Beauty hasn’t ever been all about looks. Back in the day, noblewomen didn’t wear corsets just to look slim and pretty: they were also to maintain an upright posture, reflecting the ladies’ high moral...
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The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 25 to 16
We continue our year-end countdown of the top 50 literary stories of the year. For 50 through 36, head here; for 35 to 26, click here. 25. The VIDA Count Expands, Shows Slight Improvement In April, the...
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There’s No Place For Joy in Today’s Moscow
Moscow is emptying out. Friends, old flames, are leaving. There’s a strange light in familiar windows. Even the city itself, as a space of the memory, belongs now to a past epoch, estranged from many...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Svetlana Alexievich’s History of Human Feelings
In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Born to a Ukrainian mother and a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Svetlana Alexievich Grapples with Putin’s Russia
My father would say that he personally started believing in communism after Gagarin was sent into space. We’re the first! We can do anything! That’s how he and my mother raised us. I was a Little...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How the Writer Listens: Svetlana Alexievich
For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From Mukasonga to Alexievich, We Need Writers Who Bear Witness
“I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer.” These are the words of author Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost 27 family members—including her mother and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
5 Books Making News This Week: Mothers, Memoirs, and Military Women
This year’s fiction and nonfiction longlists for the Brooklyn Library Literary Prize honor “books which—by subverting literary forms, pushing against established ways of thinking, or otherwise...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Svetlana Alexievich on Why She Does What She Does
For two years I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading. What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Women Experience Beauty: A Reading List
Beauty hasn’t ever been all about looks. Back in the day, noblewomen didn’t wear corsets just to look slim and pretty: they were also to maintain an upright posture, reflecting the ladies’ high moral...
View Article